Abstract
As Arctic sea ice extent continues to decline, remote sensing observations are becoming even more vital for the monitoring and understanding of sea ice. Recently, the sea ice community has entered a new era of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites operating at C-band with the launch of Sentinel-1A in 2014, Sentinel-1B in 2016 and the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) in 2019. These missions represent 5 spaceborne SAR sensors, that together routinely cover the pan-Arctic sea ice domain. Here, we utilized over 60,000 SAR images from Sentinel-1AB (S1) and RCM to generate large-scale sea ice motion (SIM) estimates over the pan-Arctic domain from March to December, 2020. On average, 4.5 million SIM vectors from S1 and RCM were automatically detected per week for 2020 and when combined (S1+RCM) they facilitated the generation of 7-day, 25 km SIM products across the pan-Arctic domain. S1+RCM SIM provided more coverage in Hudson Bay, Davis Strait, Beaufort Sea, Bering Sea, and over the North Pole compared to SIM from S1 alone. S1+RCM SIM was able to be resolved within the narrow channels and inlets across the pan-Arctic alleviating the main limitation of coarser resolution sensors. S1+RCM SIM provided larger ice speeds with a mean difference (MD) of 1.3 km/day compared to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) SIM product and a MD of 0.76 km/day compared to Ocean and Sea Ice-Satellite Application Facility (OSI-SAF) SIM product. S1+RCM was also able to better resolve SIM in the marginal ice zone compared to the NSIDC and OSA-SAF SIM products. Overall, our results demonstrate that combining SIM from multiple spaceborne SAR satellites allows for large-scale SIM to be routinely generated across the pan-Arctic domain.
Highlights
As Arctic sea ice extent continues to decline in concert with increases in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (Notz and Stroeve, 2016), remote sensing observations are becoming even more vital for the monitoring and understanding of Arctic sea 25 ice
The sea ice community has entered a new era of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites operating at C-band with the launch of Sentinel-1A in 2014, Sentinel-1B in 2016 and the RADARSAT 10 Constellation Mission (RCM) in 2019
S1+RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) sea ice motion (SIM) provided larger ice speeds with a mean difference (MD) of 1.3 km/day compared to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) SIM product and a MD of 0.76 km/day compared to Ocean and Sea Ice-Satellite Application Facility (OSI-SAF) SIM product
Summary
As Arctic sea ice extent continues to decline in concert with increases in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (Notz and Stroeve, 2016), remote sensing observations are becoming even more vital for the monitoring and understanding of Arctic sea 25 ice. The sea ice community has entered a new era of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites operating at C-band (wavelength, = 5.5 cm) with the launch of Sentinel-1A in 2014, Sentinel-1B in 2016 (S1; Tores et al, 2012) and the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) in 2019 (Thompson, 2015) Together these missions represent 5 spaceborne SAR sensors that when combined offer the opportunity to retrieve large-scale sea ice geophysical variables with high spatiotemporal resolution. Howell et al (2019) used analysis-ready composite products generated from S1 and RADARSAT-2 based on the approach described by Small et al, (2021) to provide high spatial resolution estimates of melt onset over a large region in the northern Canadian Arctic. In this study we make use of 5 SAR satellites from the S1 and RCM missions to generate SIM over the large-scale pan-Arctic domain (Fig. 1). We used the 2020 daily pan-Arctic ice charts from the National Ice Center
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